A typical kitchen drawer might include, for example, merchant coupons, product warranties, sales receipts, product instructions, service instructions, rebates, gift certificates, product registration cards, event tickets, credit card statements, bank statements, and recipes. Collectively, we can refer to a general class of these types of documents as “retail collateral.” Paper documents are cumbersome and hard to organize.
Increasingly, retail collateral documents are sent to users electronically. Like paper documents, organizing virtual documents is cumbersome and hard to organize, as evidenced by most users email inbox. Today's electronic organizers and contact managers are most-commonly associated with the individual user, and are maintained at the user's Personal Computer (“PC”), Personal Digital Assistant (“PDA”), or at the user's workplace on the Local Application Server (“LAS”). These organizers and contact managers are for managing the users' schedule, electronic-mail messages, and database of professional and personal contacts. Although a user can manually set up folders in which to transfer email messages from the inbox, given the volumes of messages a typical user receives between commercial and personal emails, the typical user's inbox becomes much like the cluttered kitchen drawer. Accordingly, these organizers and contact managers are not well-suited to maintaining retail collateral documents of the type listed above, because such important documents will typically become lost in the “fog” of the cluttered inbox.